Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system refers to a system organizing and storing organization's electronic documents and other business-related objects and/or content. ECM system may comprise content management systems (CMS), document management systems (DMS) and data management systems. Such systems comprise various features for managing electronic documents, e.g. storing, versioning, indexing, searching for and retrieval of documents. It is appreciated that there are both dynamic and static content management systems. The difference between dynamic and static systems is the way they store files. In the static systems files are stored e.g. in a constant treelike hierarchy that defines relationships for folders and documents stored in the tree. In the dynamic systems the files may be given identifications that define their existence in the system. The location of the files is not constant, but may vary in a virtual space depending on the situation.
In the enterprise content management system, electronic objects, such as documents, proceed through a workflow having certain action states for the electronic object. The action states are appointed with certain users who have right to perform the action in question. The right can be given to individual user or a user group defined by a role. Such a role is determined at system-level so that when a user group is defined, also users belonging to such groups are statically defined.